Nationhood, National Identity and Democracy: Australian Senate Inquiry

Nationhood, national identity and democracy: Australian Senate Inquiry On 29 July 2019 the Senate referred the following matters to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee for inquiry and report by the last sitting day of May 2020: Kevin Brennan I have just two central yet unequivocal arenas of concern and action in relation to this Senate Inquiry 1. The paucity of real substance to the thing we like to call Australian Citizenship 2. The profoundly dystopian philosophical underpinnings of Australian Society today Up front, I summarise the point I am making relative to a Term of Reference and include along with the summary, the recommendation/s I see as fitting and appropriate. The pages following that are the detail – where I make and sustain my arguments. Nationhood, national identity and democracy, with particular reference to: a. the changing notions of nationhood, citizenship and modern notions of the nation state in the twenty first century; I submit that Australia’s nationhood and citizenship suffered “arrested development” because of our status as a ‘colony’ and a distant outpost of the then British Empire. As a result, the ‘founding documents’ necessary to mature nationhood were only partially developed resulting in the fact that we have a Constitution that does not properly serve the Australian people in the 21st century because it was never designed to do so; and that we DO NOT HAVE an appropriate people’s document that complements our Constitution and gives Australians the certainty of substantive citizenship and clearly articulated, universal rights and responsibilities apart from adjudication and legal argument by Courts. And this especially applies to Australia’s First Nations peoples. I further submit that, based on current analysis, Australia may be an independent nation but we are not truly sovereign because of this fundamental short-coming. RECOMMENDATIONS: Develop a People’s (or Citizen’s) Charter document as the second rail (or second wing) of our ‘ship of State’ to define citizenship and its scope and instruments and to enable and facilitate our mature nationhood standing as both independent and truly sovereign. b. rights and obligations of citizenship, including naturalisation and revocation, and the responsibility of the state to its citizens in both national and international law; I submit that professional analysis of the legal status of Australia and Australians indicates that the only ‘universal’ right Australians have is that if one is technically a ‘citizen’, one has the ‘right of abode’: the right to call Australia home. All other rights Senate Inquiry Submission | Kevin Brennan | September 2019: Page 1 of 26 are non-universal and subject to adjudication and legal argument by Courts. And this is of particular significance to Australia’s First Nations peoples. RECOMMENDATIONS: Insert and embed a Charter of Rights and Responsibilities into the aforementioned People’s (or Citizen’s) Charter document; and include in that document clear lines of accountability responsibility, recourse and redress to provide the missing balance between government and the governed. This would include appropriate recognition of the prior claims of Australia’s First Nations peoples. c. social cohesion and cultural identity in the nation state; I submit 1) that Australia has many ‘histories’ which all depend on the biases and ‘angles’ the various protagonists come from; 2) that Australia has never really been ‘cohesive’ as to its sociology or its culture; 3) that the ‘cohesion’ we from time to time experience is usually around war, disaster or special events; 4) that Australia in the 21st century is now irretrievably un-cohesive, with cultural cohesion mostly limited to ethnic sub-groups, giving rise to the multi-Australia we now are. I further submit that the cultural cohesion claimed by certain personal interests are expressions of what I call the ‘blue barrel bear syndrome’ where ‘the world’ is what each sees painted on the inside of their particular blue (conservative) barrel like the bear that got its head stuck in one such barrel. RECOMMENDATIONS: Clear signals need to be given (and clear steps taken) by our elected governments to foster, encourage and broaden community debates on what it means to be Australia and Australian; and an important part of this is to undo the dystopian and retrograde steps taken in recent years that do the opposite (in particular those steps we have taken to criminalise whistleblowers and the criticism of governments. d. the role that globalisation and economic interdependence and economic development plays in forming or disrupting traditional notions of national identity; I submit that it is not hard to see from current UK goings-on that it is near impossible for “sovereign” governments or citizens to extricate themselves from what they considers inappropriate and/or unbalanced or discriminatory deals that have been forced on many nations as a direct result of the application of globalisation principles and, more precisely, the unfettered whims of global capital. National sovereignty is critically at stake because global corporations see themselves as the only legitimate form of ‘government’ when it comes to economic and national budget matters. This raises the critical question: does economic interdependence trump (pardon the pun) economic independence? I further submit that this is a debate we need to have at local community and non-professional- economist levels precisely because ‘economy’ literally means household, not simply budgets, accounting and finance. RECOMMENDATIONS: Balance the debate on these matters by a temporary silencing of global finance interests and amplifying citizen input to try to prize heads out of barrels. e. contemporary notions of cultural identity, multiculturalism and regionalism; I submit that Australia has a fairly robust arena of cultural identity and its propagation into the nation’s psyche; and I submit that this has tended to push those cultural identities into cohorts with somewhat rigid boundaries (thus enabling the multi-Australia I refer to). I further submit that a response to this has been that some rural and regional areas have decided to ‘join them’ rather than ‘beat them’, leading to the situation where rural and regional communities seek to establish themselves similarly to ethnic cohorts, thus increasing the number of ‘multi-Australia’ identities. I further submit that this is, in part, a flow-on from the paucity of substance to Australian citizenship and nationhood. Senate Inquiry Submission | Kevin Brennan | September 2019: Page 2 of 26 RECOMMENDATIONS: Put substance into citizenship by means of citizen engagement in citizenship and nationhood debates, projects and enterprises – especially inclusive of First Nations peoples. f. the extent to which nation states balance domestic imperatives and sovereignty and international obligations; I submit that the main reason we have a problem here is that we have never put in place the founding documents necessary (never finished our nationhood project) and that we need desperately to do so. Globalised economy is insanity if it’s not coupled with globalised society (open borders) and globalised government (universal law and simultaneous policy). Without the latter two, the former is – as we now know all too well – disastrous for most and a cornucopia for the few. RECOMMENDATIONS: Re-nationalisation of important infrastructure and enterprises. g. comparison between Australian public debate and policy and international trends; I submit that, in this matter, White Australia has never graduated from primary school; and that our ‘school’ has predominantly been the ‘school of hard knocks’ with bullies in charge. I further submit that this is largely because of 1) our being, from conception through inception, a place for the landed gentry and their convict servants – always a divided place; and 2) our denial of the problem and our concomitant unwillingness to address it. [White Australia was riven with apartheid principles, yet we ignored that and put our efforts into fighting South African apartheid; today, we are an apartheid nation that refuses to be honest with itself.] RECOMMENDATIONS: Learn from South Africa and Germany (for example) and repent, forgive and include the excluded. Along with altered national ego, we should change our national anthem (fittingly) from “Advance Australia Fair (White)” to “I am, You are, We are Australian”. Implementing above recommendations helps this process. h. any other related matters. I submit that many of the sufferings of Australians currently – whether First Nations people or, like me, fourth- or fifth-generation born here – stem directly from (metaphorically) drinking from a poisoned well. The so-called economic principles Australia now works blindly and carelessly to are the principles established, consolidated and propagandized by psychopathic megalomaniacs; and in many instances – as I found out when I returned to university as a mature-age student – these principles are little more than the whims and wishes of the world’s rich elites and the academics who support them. I submit that everybody engaged in implementing these principles knows they do harm to the world’s citizens across the globe; they do harm to the citizens’ world; and they do harm to future generations. [For example, insisting that deficits are debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay back is patent nonsense, and economists know it (government deficits are private sector surpluses); it’s just not in their interests to unveil the truth – which I believe is the definition of obscurantism and obfuscation.] RECOMMENDATIONS: Get the economics theories right; get the economists reading the right textbooks and listening to the right people, not the Right People. Were we to become an actual sovereign nation, with a full set of founding documents, we could stand up in the world as an adult and become a beacon of sane and mature governance instead of being a child at play on a leash being led blithely along by a gaggle of neurotic plutocrats. What follows is detail and explanation around the above matters.

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